This article explores the politics of reconstruction and the competing memorial practices that emerged after a devastating earthquake in western India during 2001. The material is drawn from extensive ethnographic research and analyses of the politics of rehabilitation in the ''prememorial era,'' the period before an official memorial is erected when the gap between the signified (the earthquake) and the signifier (the memorial) is still wide open and meanings and narratives of the disaster are being created, rehearsed, and contested. Many of the reconstruction initiatives undertaken after the disaster are inseparable from the politics of contemporary Hindu nationalism. Consequently, the main sections of the article examine the political nature of memorial practices and ideas about reconstruction in relation to expressions of nationalism and regionalism.
A number of recent attempts to describe what happens in the 'embodied' space between action and the discursive language used to describe that action have been primarily informed by various Western theories of mind. In this article, I present an indigenous theory of what happens among Sunni Muslims in a South Asian context in the gap between linguistic utterances and the actions they purport to represent. The ethnography focuses on learning craft and social skills among apprentices in the shipyards in the Indian state of Gujarat. It is argued that acquiring both kinds of skills is underscored by particular conceptions of the body and the possible transformations of the soul through physical activity. Figure 3. A drill such as the one Sukhet learned to use. The cord is wrapped around the grooves in the shaft and the bow is moved back and forth, forcing the bit to rotate.
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